MEANINGFUL GUIDANCE (when job insecurity has been normalised) Dr. - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

MEANINGFUL GUIDANCE (when job insecurity has been normalised) Dr. Petra Elftorp 7 th November 2019 Dublin

Over the next 50 minutes we will discuss… Definitions and context Implications What is our role?

Meaningful Guidance Career The changing labour market

MEANINGFUL GUIDANCE

Career Construction & Life-designing • The goal is not to enable self-realisation (discovering an inherent ‘self’) but self - creation (create the self you want to be) (Savickas 2011) Career • How useful is it for marginalised individuals facing social and structural barriers to secure employment?

Narrative guidance counselling methods • Client narrates - tells the story of his/her past and present career development and constructs future career • Time consuming • There is a risk that the pervasive individualism underpin the process without an explicit critical narrative counselling method

Career Management Skills (CMS) Critique Strengths • Encourages agency and • Do not recognise social factors prevents ‘helplessness’ sufficiently • Suggests unemployment is due • Equips the person with useful career and life skills to lack of CMS (you have ‘failed’) • Provides a framework and • Can really all CMS skills be structure for practitioners taught? Do they have to be experienced and developed over long time?

Employment Outcomes of Measurable, Self- ‘upwards’ ‘meaningful’ confidence progression Meaningful guidance guidance Career Personal maturity development

Employment Measurable, Fairness? ‘upwards’ Outcomes of progression ‘meaningful’ Meaningful guidance guidance Self- Personal confidence development Career maturity

CAREER

Current career metaphors • Protean career (Proteus – Greek god who could change shape and adapt) • Boundaryless career (metaphor a bare landscape! Nothing is stopping you from going where you want…) • Life designer - career as constructed and we can craft our own careers over time

Changing ideas about careers • One job ‘for life’ – or upward progression Past • (probably your father’s job or in local industry) • (generally not available for women, people with a disability, marginalised etc.) • Change, change, change, upskill, re-skill, up-skill! Present • Be passionate! • Precariousness, short- term, project based, ‘self - employed’ • Automation & Artificial Intelligence? Future • Impact of the fourth industrial revolution? • Employment law?

The Problem with Predictions… • …is that they are ‘only’ predictions! – and they have been wrong before. • Large amount of resources are placed on creating reports predicting ‘future jobs’ and skills needs on the labour market. • Focus on structural shifts in employer demand. • However , employment opportunities will arise when workers retire from the workforce – and replacement needs are expected to provide significantly more job openings than employment growth over the next decade, even in those occupations where employer demand is otherwise expected to fall.

Lifelong learning replacing lifelong career

THE LABOUR MARKET

Perception However… Many jobs have become obsolete due to technology Technology is creating more jobs than it is taking away Increase in entrepreneurialism (self-employment) Not their own boss…. High unemployment levels amongst migrants Needed to address ‘aging population issues’ “Rapid changes on the labour market” Not that fast - just difficult to see the trends!

https://twitter.com/FreeNow_IE/status/1181229802214346757?s=09

The ‘Gig economy’ • Often associated with ‘platform’ companies such as AirBnB, Deliveroo, Uber • Contingent workers, virtual workers, remote workers, independent contractors, consultants, freelance workers… • But insecurity and precariousness has become normalised in many sectors • Young academic lecturers, accountants and architects (for example) face lower pay, less stable jobs, poorer working conditions and more freelancing than their older colleagues.

Why? The perfect storm Neoliberalism • Recession with high unemployment Global recession rates with high unemployment • Technological innovations – smartphones and apps Technology • Neoliberalism - deregulation of markets • To Survive -Take whatever job you can (i.e. temporary work, poor conditions etc.) Precarious work

IMPLICATIONS

Will employment law catch up with the economy and change the landscape? Workers’ Rights

Implications… • Career decision making - more difficult as job profiles change and there is a fear that vocational training will be outdated (more difficult to commit to long courses) • Social impact – difficult to save for the future, affecting home ownership, long- term relationships and having children. • Union membership - not accessible for workers who frequently change employment status But workers organise themselves in new ways: • Agency staff organised wildcat walkouts, and takeaway couriers used their bikes and motorcycles to bring major roads to a standstill. • Cooperatives – as alternative to global gig economy platforms

Implications for our sense of self • Careers are intertwined with our identity • Job insecurity threatens a person’s identity as an ‘employed person’ • Reduced well-being, less commitment to peers (source Menéndez-Espina et al. 2019)

translation : Don’t jump from job to job [a drifter] doesn’t learn anything properly, he will have difficulties getting a good job in the future and will not be used to new machines which increases the risk of accidents in the workplace… 1949 advert in Sweden

Attitudes and values • The labour market has changed - But have our expectations and values surrounding ‘career development’ changed? • Still get suspicious of someone who ‘can’t hold down a job’ – a ‘drifter’ • Responsibilisation – individualisation of social structures and problems

What can we do?

Advice from employers: - Ensure workers are more flexible! - Information, information, information - Make them more ‘employable’! - Make workers resilient!

Advice from career development theories: Many career theories are rooted in psychology and focus on • self -development • self -improvement • self -efficacy • self -creation and • self -regulation. Part of the neoliberal discourse, involving: Individualisation of structural problems

Distribution of responsibilities Labour Individual market

What is our role? Watts (1996) identified four broad ideologies in guidance Conservative • Guidance counsellors as agents of social control Liberal • Non-directive guidance Progressive • Guidance as means of individual change Radical • Guidance to promote social change

The Adjust – Challenge Dilemma (Prilleltensky and Stead 2012) neither adjust to the system nor adjust to the system but do not challenge it challenge it challenge the system but do not adjust to, and challenge the system, adjust to it at the same time

WHAT DO YOU DO?

The Adjust – Challenge Dilemma Why do some adapt and others challenge?

I want to have it explained in a I just thought I was stupid you different way. I’m not thick, I’m know. Going to school I quite intelligent. And I’m not thought ‘what a stupid girl, arrogant, I just know that it could can’t do a thing, I just can’t be explained in a different way. And do anything’. I ask for it. Elftorp (2017) ‘ A Study of the Guidance Counselling Needs of Adults with Dyslexia within the Irish Adult Educational Guidance Service’

Why do some adapt and others challenge? Precondition: Becoming aware of an injustice (Honneth 1995; Dewey 1973)

CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN GUIDANCE?

Paulo Freire Critical consciousness in guidance? • Critical Consciousness is the ability to identify , critique , and challenge the social forces that produce inequity and oppression. • AND subsequently take action to dismantle the systems and institutions that sustain them. • Examples of advocates for CC in guidance: Blustein; Sultana, Thomsen and Hooley; Elftorp

Developing critical consciousness through guidance? • Identify and name oppression • Question normalised values • Encourage collectivism (working together) • Guidance on all levels (individual and societal) See Hooley, T., Sultana, R. and Thomsen, R. (2019). Career guidance for emancipation: Reclaiming justice for the multitude. London: Routledge.

Developing critical consciousness through guidance? • Identify and name oppression • Question normalised values • Encourage collectivism (working together) • Guidance on all levels (individual and societal)

Developing critical consciousness through guidance? • Identify and name oppression • Question normalised values • Encourage collectivism (working together) • Guidance on all levels (individual and societal)

Developing critical consciousness through guidance? • Identify and name oppression • Question normalised values • Encourage collectivism (working together) • Guidance on all levels (individual and societal)